Lute Score: A Concordance

I spent the day working on a bossa remix of an older song, Homemade Soup. Not sure if I'll use it. Decided that Lady Fancy Knickers suits the album much better, and deserves a place there. Went back to work on Lute Score, yesterday's song. Prompted by an anonymous poster who said 'I missed some dampened taka-taka or tuf-tuf noises, the sound of the brutal panda shooting. Shooting pandas in silence frightens more than with a lot of piff paff', I made a new mix with video game noises and a bit less of Ye Olde Momus patented secret recipe tempo distortion at the beginning. The new mix is here:

Lute Score

Sometimes people send little reviews with their Paypal donations. Someone called Jesse Eisenhower called 'Lute Score' 'far far and away my favorite of the new,' describing it as 'a pre-3d wonderland' that 'would have found a happy home on the TurboGrafX 16'. (Whatever that is.) Richard Gardner of Los Angeles, California, asked 'Did Babelfish help co-author this?' Well, not this time. It did occur to me, though, that much of this album is just 'reformatted internet'. The ideas, the instruments, the scales, the sounds, the words, the ideas, everything. When people ask me what instrument I play, I should really answer 'the internet'. When they ask me what I do for a living, I should say 'I get stuff free off the internet, put it in a new order, and sell it to people for money'.

Prompted by Richard's question, though, I thought it might be interesting to go through Lute Score tracing where each line came from. This is a 'mumble' song, a 'nonsense' song, a 'notebook' song, the kind where, under cover of a certain lighthearted whimsicality, I trawl through my zuihitsu ('random jottings') and end up packing in a huge number of themes and allusions that actually mean rather a lot to me personally -- without making the song any less fluffy and cute. Think of my themes as presidential talking points, or pandas popping their heads over the foliage in a rather sadistic video game. Here goes:

You locked me in the bathroom long ago, you bloody bastard

I was at a concert at Superdeluxe in Tokyo last July, and my friend Yuka was singing a song with her band Metro. I couldn't really hear the lyrics properly, but it sounded as if she was singing a song accusing someone of having locked her in the bathroom. I thought 'What a great idea for a song!' Of course, it turned out to be a 'creative mishearing'. I'd like to make an entire feature film one day about someone locked in a bathroom, and why, and what they do to keep things interesting.

But sadness never floods a house where wine flows

This is from an account of Uzbek music I read on the web. It's a translation of a song from Tashkent. The statement is probably true. It's yet another variant on the 'throwing wine in the face of nothing' theme, the Dionysiac element that seems to inform the record. And of course I was planning to call the album 'Uzbektronic', wasn't I?

Lute Score, the video game where you hit the high score by composing
Lute Scores, and shooting off the pop up panda's head

Something made me scribble down 'Lute Score' as a song title. The double meaning of 'score' makes it a video game involving lutes, not just a notation. Lute Score is not a real computer game. But I like to imagine it as something Jeff Minter might have coded for the Atari. Or something like the Bachtron game described in my Electronics in the 18th century show at KnitActive back in 2000. I asked my nephew what he wanted to do when he grows up and he said 'code computer games,' so maybe he can do this game one day. I hope pandas aren't extinct by that time. Pandas keep popping up on my album because they're a symbol both of selfishness (I've never seen anything more slobbish than the Giant Panda at Berlin zoo, lying on its back guzzling bamboo) and of the damage wrought by selfishness (they're endangered by our consumerism). We are pandas, but we are also panda-killers. If the pandas were us, they would kill pandas too. I've been trying to find a way to write a song about a panda that just wants to be a dog, to illustrate my idea that those charged with maintaining diversity often just want to be normal too. It's a rather similar point to the idea that those who live in 'exemplary' high density inner city housing just want to spread out in the suburbs. Some virtues (diversity, density) are not even virtues to the people who practice them. They're 'virtues by default'.

When the monster attacked the city everyone was just too busy making money to give a shit

That was another song idea. What if they held a disaster and nobody noticed? Just how big does an urban event have to be before people stop thinking about money and start thinking about something else? Gigantic monkey sized? Enormous sea dragon sized?

In Samarkand Uzbekistan the Vietnamese chiropodist
Extracted a glass of clear green tea from his samovar

Local colour. I often think of Auden's poem The Fall of Rome when I put in details like this:

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast

A ghost tended two moss gardens, one marshmallow, one ectoplasm
Something to do with the free bamboo, something to do with the snow

That's something I had in my notebook, the ghost is almost a character from a Brothers Quay movie, I think.

Green plants, folk and fairy tales from German Africa

There just can't be too many green plant and green tea references on this record. They are a symbol of 'the good' for me. As are folk and fairy tales. Models of clear, pure folk form. German Africa represents 'the other in the other', a double density of strangeness.

Swamp leg, an inner lightbulb, tragedy on stilts

These are painting titles by Philip Guston and Paul Klee. 'Going For A Walk With A Line' on Folktronic also uses a lot of Klee titles. I love the quirky miniature world Klee packs into a few words.

Pins and needles, shoes and stockings, aches and pains, and vermin
Panthers waging war on cranes and storks

This list was part of a presentation in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles. The museum presents a series of whooping whoppers as if they were established facts. It's therefore a model of Munchausian / Momusian unreliable narration. Actually, I shouldn't say 'Momusian', because the first time I visited the MJT I totally failed to understand that everything in it was fake.

A battered, bandaged head climbs up an uphill landscape

This is an image from a Guston painting. Saw it in San Francisco last July, at SF MoMA.

A 200 foot wingspan black butterfly in space

I went to the room of a Japanese art student, also in San Francisco last July, and made up a story I whispered into her ear. (That's my third favourite thing to do.) It was about this black butterfly.

An eager red-eyed dog licks red raw meat from an open ash can
Lamps, chairs, books, lightbulbs, cherries from a knife

From a catalogue description of late Guston again.

A Decca-Deram furbelow, master of the bungalow

Decca Deram is the label a lot of David Bowie's early, quirky work is on. I wish he would make a weird vaudeville album about children, soldiers and losers again! 'Furbelow' is a word that deserves to be in more pop songs, I feel. It's the detail on a lady's garment. I don't know why a record label would be making them. Perhaps they fell on hard times when people stopped writing songs about gnomes.

Writing with the white ink, the white ink of life

No Momus song is complete without an elegant reference to sperm.

(Note: No pandas were harmed in the writing of this song.)